By Paul Ingram

TUCSON Ariz. (Reuters) – A Mexican immigrant who took refuge in an Arizona church to avoid deportation from a country where he has lived illegally for over a decade and raised a family can stay in the United States, a federal official said on Tuesday.

Daniel Neyoy Ruiz, 36, had been ordered to report for voluntary deportation in May. But in a high-profile challenge to U.S. immigration policy he instead turned to a Tucson church whose leaders were involved in a movement to give sanctuary to Central American refugees in the 1980s.

After spending nearly a month in the church, Neyoy Ruiz was notified by immigration officials on Monday that he had been granted a one-year stay, which can be renewed annually and includes a work permit. A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman confirmed a stay of removal had been issued.

“I cried,” Neyoy Ruiz said of the decision granting him a stay, which had been twice denied previously. “I cried out of happiness and we hugged each other knowing that this was done.”

Neyoy Ruiz, who has a teenage son who is a U.S. citizen, was ordered to report for voluntary deportation stemming from a 2011 traffic stop. After he took refuge in the church on May 13, immigration officials said they would not immediately act to deport him. Now that a stay has been granted, the family plans to leave the church.

“Daniel’s case is not exceptional, and the fact that he was never granted prosecutorial discretion and then later denied a stay of removal should be reviewed by immigration officials,” said Margo Cowan, the family’s lawyer.

Federal immigration officials have focused their enforcement efforts on stopping illegal border crossers and deporting unauthorized immigrants convicted of crimes. Ruiz has never been convicted of a crime, his attorney said.

Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which seeks to limit numbers entering the United States, criticized the action.

“While law enforcement agencies should prioritize cases, there’s no reason that a deportation order shouldn’t be enforced,” Mehlman said.

Neyoy Ruiz is not the first immigrant to turn to a church for refuge from deportation. In 2006, Mexican immigrant activist Elvira Arellano famously entered a Chicago church and stayed there for a year, but was ultimately deported.

(Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Lisa Shumaker)

• Immigration Issues
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WASHINGTON (AP) — A divided Supreme Court ruled Monday that most immigrant children who have become adults during their parents’ years-long wait to become legal permanent residents of the United States should go to the back of the line in their own wait for visas.

In a 5-4 decision, the justices sided with the Obama administration in finding that immigration laws offer relief only to a tiny percentage of children who “age out” of the system when they turn 21. The majority — tens of thousands of children— no longer qualify for the immigration status granted to minors.

The case is unusual in that it pitted the administration against immigration reform advocates who said government officials were misreading a law intended to keep families together by preventing added delays for children seeking visas.

The ruling also features President Barack Obama’s two court appointees — Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — on opposing sides of a complicated debate over what the law means and what Congress intended when it wrote the laws governing wait times for children seeking visas.

The case does not have any impact on the recent influx of thousands of immigrant children traveling on their own to cross the U.S. border from Mexico.

Five justices agreed with the outcome of the case but there was no majority opinion. Writing for three justices, Kagan said the law preserves the place in line for a child whose petition for a visa was filed directly by a parent who is a green card holder, but not for children in other categories. She was joined by Justices Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a separate opinion agreeing only with the outcome, but not Kagan’s reasoning.

Because approving families for green cards can take years, tens of thousands of immigrant children age out of the system each year, according to government estimates. Congress tried to fix the problem in 2002 when it passed the Child Status Protection Act. The law allows aged-out children to retain their child status longer or qualify for a valid adult category and keep their place in line.

But appeals courts have split over whether the law applies to all children or only those in specific categories. The Obama administration argued that the law applied only to a narrow category of immigrants, leaving out most of the children affected. Government attorneys said that applying the law too broadly would lead to too many young adults entering the country ahead of others waiting in line.

Immigration advocates assert that the law was passed to promote family unity. According to Catholic Legal Immigration Network, forcing an aged-out child to go back to the end of the line would increase his or her wait time by more than nine years. By contrast, it says keeping the child’s priority dates would increase the wait time for others by just a few months.

The case involved Rosalina Cuellar de Osorio, a Salvadoran immigrant who was in line for a visa along with her 13-year-old son. But after years of waiting, her son turned 21 and government officials said he no longer qualified as an eligible child. He was placed at the back of the line, resulting in a wait of several more years.

The family won its challenge before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but the Supreme Court reversed that decision.

In a lengthy dissent, Sotomayor said there is no conflict in the law and it should be read to clearly allow all aged-out children to keep their place in line. She quotes a book by Scalia in which he says courts “do not lightly presume that Congress has legislated in self-contradicting terms.”

Sotomayor was joined in dissent by Justices Stephen Breyer, Clarence Thomas. Justice Samuel Alito wrote a separate dissent.

A group of lawmakers in Congress when the law was passed — including Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. — submitted a brief arguing against the government in the case.

Immigration reform groups were hoping the issue would be addressed in Congress. The Senate last year passed a bipartisan bill that would tighten border security, provide enforcement measures and offer a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the United States illegally. That measure stalled in the House, where Republicans have rejected a comprehensive approach in favor of a bill-by-bill process.

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Follow Sam Hananel on Twitter at http://twitter.com/SamHananelAP

• Company Legal & Law Matters
• Immigration Issues
• Barack Obama
• Sonia Sotomayor
• Elena Kagan

By Kathryn Doyle

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Minority children often lag behind their peers in language development when they start preschool. According to a new study, some of that disparity in school readiness may be due to differences in the frequency of “book sharing” among families.

The study found that parents in Hispanic or Asian immigrant families in California were less likely to read or look at picture books with their young children than non-Hispanic white parents.

“I think there’s enough research that reading to children early on prepares them better for school,” senior author Dr. Fernando Mendoza told Reuters Health. “Early reading enlarges vocabulary and becomes a tool for many other kinds of learning later on in school.”

Mendoza worked on the study at the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California.

“There is a difference in the reported reading in immigrant households, but we have a long way to go in understanding what is behind that,” added Natalia Festa, who also worked on the study at Stanford.

The researchers looked at data from statewide telephone surveys of households in California in 2005, 2007 and 2009. The surveys asked almost 15,000 parents of children under age six how often anyone in the household read stories or looked at picture books with the child.

About half of the children in the study had two U.S.-born parents, with the other half having at least one foreign-born parent, which qualified as an immigrant family.

As a whole, 67 percent of kids shared books with their parents on a daily basis, and another 22 percent did so almost daily, according to the surveys. Seven percent of kids shared books with parents one or two days per week, and the remaining four percent never shared books, the researchers reported in Pediatrics.

Parents with low education levels or a low household income were less likely to book share with their kids. But even when those factors were taken into account, immigrant parents were less likely to share books than native-born parents.

“This paper just says there is a difference, and not because they’re poor, but because they are immigrants,” Mendoza said.

More than two thirds of parents in English-speaking households reported daily book sharing, compared to half of parents in non-English-speaking homes.

“Findings like this are really important, they continue to document the ways that immigrant families are at risk,” said Dr. Alan L. Mendelsohn, who studies child development at the New York University School of Medicine. He was not part of the new research.

Reading or storytelling in early life predicts how well children will do when they enter preschool, which translates to how they do when they start kindergarten, which is incredibly predictive of achievement later in school and in life, Mendelsohn said.

Since economic differences don’t explain the trends seen in the study, cultural differences in child rearing might, according to pediatrics researcher Dr. Barry S. Zuckerman of the Boston University School of Medicine.

“Most immigrant parents, particularly those from rural areas of their native countries, grew up where their parents didn’t read to them,” Zuckerman told Reuters Health. He also didn’t participate in the new study.

What’s important about book sharing, he said, is that it’s an interactive experience between parent and child.

“We do know that input into the brain system changes the brain architecture, and not reading specifically, but exposure to words,” he said. “Children learn words and language when it’s a response to them.”

With picture books, parents help the child name an animal or elaborate on the stories in the pictures, he said.

Many immigrant parents may have two jobs or work long hours, leaving less time for book sharing, Mendoza said.

The experts agreed that it is likely not an issue of available children’s books in languages other than English, since telling a story based on a picture book requires almost no actual reading for the parent.

“What this work really highlights is the importance of engaging families early in life,” Mendelsohn said.

The study authors highlight programs that promote childhood literacy and center on family visits to the pediatrician, like Reach Out and Read, which Zuckerman founded. Reach Out and Read provides books in the family’s preferred language and involves taking some time out of regular pediatric visits for the doctor and parent to discuss the importance of reading.

A language barrier between the doctor and parent in that setting could make reading advocacy programs less effective for immigrant families, but that’s a question that needs further investigation, Mendoza said.

More than half of children born in California today are Latino, and investing in their future is investing in the future of the country as a whole, he said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1iLGDBH Pediatrics, online June 2, 2014.

• Family & Relationships
• Parenting

By Julia Edwards

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. immigrant groups urged President Barack Obama on Tuesday to hold off on making changes to how the United States deports undocumented immigrants so as not to anger members of Congress who they believe could pass a broad immigration bill that could be more effective at protecting immigrant rights.

Among the groups issuing the statement were the National Immigration Forum and the Service Employees International Union, which were present at a March meeting at the White House when Obama announced he was looking to take unilateral action to curb the number of undocumented immigrants being deported. At the time, the House of Representatives appeared stalled on passing broad reform over concerns the bill would grant amnesty to those who had broken U.S. immigration law.

House Republicans, including House Speaker John Boehner, have indicated in recent weeks that they might be open to working on such a bill. But they said any changes from the Obama administration would deteriorate their trust in the president to enforce whatever law they may pass.

The advocates said there is a “real window of opportunity” for the House to pass immigration reform before the legislative recess in August and they cautioned Obama against taking unilateral action.

“We believe the President should move cautiously and give the House Leadership all of the space they may need to bring legislation to the floor for a vote,” the advocates said in a statement.

But, the statement added, should July pass without a new immigration law, the Obama administration will “have an obligation to use whatever tools are at its disposal.”

(Reporting by Julia Edwards; Editing by Dan Grebler)

• Politics & Government
• Immigration Issues
• Barack Obama

Copenhagen (AFP) – Denmark’s anti-immigrant party is expected to become the country’s largest in Sunday’s EU election while their Swedish peers lag behind, highlighting different political and economic landscapes in the two countries.

Opinion polls show the Danish People’s Party (DPP) is backed by one in four voters in the European Parliament vote, putting them ahead of the ruling Social Democrats.

Their popularity has been boosted by fears that low-paid migrant workers are threatening Scandinavia’s labour model, where collective bargaining ensures high wages even for unskilled jobs.

The populist party has also benefitted from a heated debate on whether eastern European guest workers should be eligible for Denmark’s generous child and unemployment benefits, even if they have only worked briefly in the country.

As he canvassed votes outside Copenhagen’s main train station on Wednesday morning, Denmark’s top Social Democratic MEP Jeppe Kofod was met by a somewhat underwhelming response.

“People were busy because they had to get to work, they had to get to the bus and so on,” he told AFP.

Many of those voting for the DPP did so because of “the very tough economic situation there has been since the financial crisis,” he said.

- Draconian immigration laws -

For a decade, the DPP pressured Denmark’s centre-right government to adopt some of Europe’s most draconian immigration regulations in exchange for its backing in parliament.

Its role as kingmaker ended with the 2011 election when a leftist government took power.

Since then it has dropped some of its most contentious rhetoric about Islam, instead adopting a more centrist agenda focused on preserving the welfare state as the country was gripped by economic crisis.

Issues of national identity and culture remain at its core, and are frequently part of the criticism levelled against the EU by its charismatic MEP Morten Messerschmidt.

But his flippant remarks are a far cry from a 2001 advertisement for which he was convicted of racism.

In it, the DPP’s youth wing claimed multi-ethnic societies led to “mass rapes, gross violence, insecurity, forced marriages, oppression of women (and) gang crime”.

Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt has dismissed the DPP’s claims of benefits tourism by EU migrants in Denmark and the Social Democrats have taken out newspaper advertisements attacking Messerschmidt.

MEP hopeful Kofod has spent the final days of his campaign arguing other countries should help pay the 200 million kroner (26.8 million euros, $36.5 million) Denmark spends annually on jailing foreign criminals in a bid to win over voters.

“I would like to send that bill back to those countries,” he told public broadcaster DR on Monday.

Yet this had little impact on the eurosceptic party which on Thursday polled at 26.5 percent, which would double their representation to four MEPs from today’s two.

- Anti-racism protests -

By contrast, the fellow anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats (SD) are expected to end up with around seven percent of the vote on Sunday, giving the party its first seat in the European Parliament.

The party has only been in parliament since 2010 and is dogged by historical links to the extreme right. It may also receive fewer protest votes than the Danish party since Sweden’s economy has been among the strongest in Europe in recent years.

But the DPP and the SD, who sometimes attend each other’s meetings and stump speeches, have a more sinister theory as to why the Swedes are shunning the far right. They argue the Swedish party has suffered because their opponents have impeded their freedom of speech.

Sweden Democrat rallies have been greeted by sometimes violent protests across the country, postmen have refused to distribute the party’s ballots, firemen and nurses refused to meet them, and their posters have been vandalised.

“When Sweden Democrats appear in public in Sweden they have to be protected by a whole army of policemen. That keeps a lot of people away,” said Karsten Lorentzen, an MEP candidate for the DPP.

That view is contested by many Swedish analysts.

“These demonstrations can boost support for the Sweden Democrats in the short term, giving them publicity and mobilising their core voters,” said Ulf Bjereld, a political science professor at the University of Gothenburg.

SD party secretary Bjoern Soeder also downplayed the influence of the protests, which he said could “motivate supporters to go and vote”.

“It was just in the 2010 general election that we got a party like us here. If you want to see high figures like in Denmark I think we have to wait until the next election,” he said.

Many Swedes continue to view the anti-immigrant party as a one-issue party with no real power, according to Bjereld.

Sweden’s main parties “have underlined that there’s no cooperation with SD. People can vote for them but they’ll not be given any influence over policies in the way DPP have had in Denmark,” he said.

• Politics & Government
• Elections
• Denmark

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–

The Immigrant Justice Corps (IJC) announced today that it has hired Rachel B. Tiven as its executive director, effective July 1, and chosen its first class of Justice Fellows. Ms. Tiven was formerly the executive director of Immigration Equality and Immigration Equality Action Fund, where she built successful advocacy and service programs that delivered results for tens of thousands of immigrant families. “We are delighted that Immigrant Justice Corps has recruited a proven leader of Rachel’s caliber,” said Second Circuit Chief Judge Robert A. Katzmann, who originated the idea for the IJC and is a founding member of its board. “Rachel has a bold and energetic vision for The Immigrant Justice Corps, and the experience to realize the organization’s potential.”

The Immigrant Justice Corps is the country’s first fellowship program dedicated to meeting the need for high-quality legal assistance for immigrants seeking citizenship and fighting deportation. Twenty-five Justice Fellows will form the inaugural class, each of them fully funded to work for two years at New York City’s top immigration service organizations.

The Fellows were selected from more than 400 applicants, and are distinguished graduates of the country’s top law schools; nearly all are bilingual, with many speaking three or four languages including Spanish, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Creole, Hindi, Urdu, and others. Ten of the Justice Fellows are first or second-generation immigrants, including one whose first asylum application was his own. All of them have demonstrated serious professional commitment to immigration law and policy. Meet the Fellows at http://justicecorps.org/meet-fellows/.

“I am thrilled to launch The Immigrant Justice Corps with such a talented class,” said Ms. Tiven. “These Fellows are a game-changing infusion of talent for immigrant New Yorkers. By placing Fellows at the city’s best immigration service organizations, The Immigrant Justice Corps will prove that quality representation can bring more families into status and out of poverty.”

In welcoming Ms. Tiven, IJC board chair and a founding partner of Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP William Zabel also saluted interim Executive Director Peter Markowitz, “for his steadfast dedication and leadership that has been vital to IJC’s successful beginning.”

Inspired by Judge Katzmann’s study group on immigrant representation and incubated by the Robin Hood Foundation, with crucial, generous support from the JPB Foundation, The Immigrant Justice Corps recruits the country’s most talented law school graduates, connects them to the best legal and community institutions, leverages the latest technologies, and fosters a culture of creative thinking that will produce new strategies to reduce the justice gap for immigrant families.

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